Transport capacity, for example cars, often travel long distances with minimal load (i.e., SUVs on daily commutes with only the driver occupying the vehicle). Such capacity is disused because of a number of reasons, including (a) an occasional need for greater capacity causes consumers to buy excess transportation capacity, (b) variations in schedule and destinations traveled create non-matched transportation needs compared with other household members, (c) lack of knowledge of trusted users who could conveniently use this excess capacity, and (d) difficulty in providing an economic benefit to incentivize the driver to share their excess capacity. Meanwhile, the driver of a vehicle often has no choice but to use a personal transport vehicle (despite the high costs involved) because of lack of accessibility, inconvenient scheduling, or multiple interchanges required if they were to rely on public transport systems.
Proposals have been made, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,697,730, to use a central assigning system and communications devices adapted to be associated with vehicles for transmitting information from the vehicles to the central assigning system, and for receiving information from the central assigning system. In the 1990s, the US Department of Transportation designated this “Dynamic Ridesharing” area a specific area of research interest, under the designation ATIS8 as part of the National ITS Architecture, and has proposed methods for transactions, interchange of billing data, and the like. Such systems, if implemented, would represent advances over methods in common practice, however, it is believed the invention described herein makes such systems more practical and useful because of the following significant innovations and claims: methods to reduce the workload/steps necessary on the driver and the rider to make this system more inconvenient; methods to improve the trustability of drivers and riders, increasing the likelihood people will use this system; a hardware device which would communicate visually to external riders; automatic determination and registration of transport capacity destination and capacity, increasing availability of shared transport vehicles; methods to characterize and publish information about “ad-hoc” transport capacity in manners similar to traditional, centrally controlled transit systems, in order to increase trust and ridership in the system; and an ad-hoc nature to the proposed system which enables casual use by registered users.
The inefficient use of transport capacity results in approximately 3-4 times as many cars on the road as would be necessary if capacity were only 50% occupied. This has the additional implications created by the excess consumption of fuel in potential environment problems (CO2 pollution and global warming) as well as geopolitical problems (for example, many countries including the United States could be energy self-sufficient if they used their existing transportation capacity only 40% better (versus the 200+% better that could theoretically be achieved).
In cities such as Los Angeles, the transportation network is largely dysfunctional (i.e., the average worker spends 1.6 hours of their day in unproductive and costly commuting via personal car on congested highways). Additionally, such a consumer cannot rely on public transit because mass transit “doesn't take them from where they live to where they work”.
Inadequate “feeder systems” for the public transit network mean that billions of dollars are spent creating subway and rail systems that are massively underused, in terms of persons transported per hour versus the potential capacity of these rail systems. The flexibility of highway and road networks, along with the critical mass of car penetration and the marketplace dynamic of urban real estate value, however, means that wherever a highway is built, personal transport cars will soon fill it, creating further urban sprawl, with all the societal and ecological disadvantages that implies.
Personal transport cars are common, among other reasons, because (a) the lack of availability of mass transit networks to serve the home or destination of the driver, (b) the inconvenience of waiting a long or unknown period of time for public transit, (c) fear of traveling with strangers or fear in waiting for long periods at public transit points.
Many large cities have successfully implemented mass transit systems which are widely used by people from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds (i.e., London, New York, Madrid, Tokyo). While even these systems can be improved, these examples show that if a Shared Transport system exists with sufficient timeliness and advantages, it will be widely used. These cities provide transit systems because these systems reduce their cost for infrastructure (i.e., building ever-larger and more inefficient highways) and increases productivity for their citizens and the companies in their region.
So, cities have long sought to provide mass transit systems which take people from where they live to where they work and/or where they shop. However, since the popularization of highways in the 1950s in the US, cities have become increasingly suburban. Highway systems do not complement mass transit systems and, in fact, work against mass transit systems by enabling urban sprawl to the point where mass transit infrastructure is unsustainable (at the extremities of a city center, due to lack of population density) and unattractive (because of inconvenient intermodal interchange). As fewer people use mass transit, less routes are supportable, less area is reachable via mass transit, and thus more people need to rely on relatively costly and ecologically damaging individual transport, resulting in the mass transit system itself imploding with a lack of critical mass, while personal transport systems simultaneously suffer through massive over-congestion.